Have a Wonderful and Safe Holiday Season

All of us at AwardSafety wish you and your family a safe Holiday Season and Healthy and Happy New Year.

Thank you for your support and the trust you’ve placed on us to provide you with the best safety award system to achieve your objectives.

When Should You Implement a Safety Incentive Award Program?

Before you determine when you should implement a safety award program, you should first decide if you really have a safety problem that can be addressed by changing the behavior of your workers.  That may sound obvious, but it isn’t always understood. 

Companies often confuse recognition awards for ongoing safety performance with safety incentives to motivate performance. They are both very valid tools to use in growing and maintaining a positive safety culture, but not necessarily interchangeable.  Motivating workers to perform (behave) in a safe manner requires all the pieces of the behavior change equation:  knowing what you want them to do, measuring how they do it, providing a positive consequence when it is completed, and then giving feedback.   If all you want to do is maintain your current positive safety performance, then providing safety recognition in the form of the awards can also be helpful. 

Many of the hundreds of “safety incentive programs” we’ve seen over the years are not safety incentives at all.  They are periodic recognition awards for overall safety performance.  Clients think recognition awards are motivating the safety performance, but they are not.  These programs don’t really effect behavior change.  Unless the behavior is changed and becomes a habit, it won’t produce a long term effect.  In these programs workers were lucky enough to have been given a recognition award for ‘being safe’. This is the simple reason why many safety professionals feel that safety incentives do not produce any long term benefits.  In actuality they weren’t designed to do so; they weren’t safety incentives at all. 

Safety recognition awards can be a valuable and strategic tool in your safety culture.  These are essentially safety communication devices that add to all of your safety programs to keep safety top of mind.  They become the ribbon that you wrap around your safety culture.  When they are used to keep safety at the forefront of your workplace, they can be effective. But they are designed to say thanks for the results, they don’t motivate workers to change behavior.

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

For Better Safety Results Make Organizational Change Personal

In 2018 McKinsey developed a leader’s guide to help companies “Make Work Meaningful.” Its simple premise was that people who find meaning at their work are happier, more productive and more engaged.  Without a rehash of the entire guide, the outline shows four straightforward practices that can help create  an environment where organizational change is personal.  These four practices are:

Reduce Anonymity

Make sure employees know who their customers are (either internally or externally) and encourage them to connect with one.  Build face to face interactions into existing processes encouraging employees to know who is most affected by their work.  Studies show that just this interaction alone can boost customer satisfaction by as much as 14%

Help Employees Understand the Impact of Their Work

Invite customers who have had the best and the worst experiences with your products to talk with employees in person so your team can see how their work affects customers.

Notice, Recognize and Reward Good Work

Create systems where colleagues and customers alike can communicate satisfaction with a task.  Everyone wants to know that their work is noticed and valued. It doesn’t have to be elaborate or expensive, but it does have to happen. “Thank you we appreciate your efforts” are simple words but they can be powerful when spoken with sincerity.

Connect Daily Work to a Higher Goal

Push people to think about their work in a high-level way by asking employees a series of “why” questions about 3 to 5 of their most important daily tasks.

As stated in the Leader’s Guide…

“it’s well understood that people who believe their job has meaning and a broader purpose are more likely to work harder, take on challenging or unpopular tasks, and collaborate effectively. Research repeatedly shows that people deliver their best effort and ideas when they feel they are part of something larger than the pursuit of a paycheck.”

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net

Employee Engagement Drives 70% Fewer Safety Incidents

The Gallup’s most recent State of the American Workplace report paints a fairly clear picture or how important employee engagement is to company success. 

When compared to organizations with lower levels of employee engagement, those with higher levels of engagement typically experience these type results:

• 41% lower absenteeism
• 24% lower turnover (high turnover industries)
• 59% lower turnover (low turnover industries)
• 28% less shrinkage
• 70% fewer employee safety incidents
• 58% fewer patient safety incidents
• 40% fewer quality incidents (defects)
• 17% higher productivity
• 20% higher sales
• 21% higher profitability

As the majority of employee engagement is based on employee satisfaction, and employee appreciation and recognition is a key component of satisfied employees, it is also fair to say that employee recognition and awards are key in increasing performance.

For years, the C-Suite constantly asked for the return on investment of recognition and reward dollars.  Is it not also fair to say that employee rewards systems can drive bottom line results and the increase in profits noted by the stats above?

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net